


Johannes Cabal and the Mass of St. Sécaire

by tristesses



Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Johannes Cabal and his slightly-willing accomplice investigate the alleged necromantic powers of an apostate saint. Things go awry. Horst is unsurprised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Johannes Cabal and the Mass of St. Sécaire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JackOfNone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/gifts).



> JackOfNone, you asked for the dirty details of necromancy, and that is what you got! You also mentioned saints, so I took that and ran with it. It's amazing the things Wikipedia will show you. *g* I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Other notes: This is a crossover with the Aleister Crowley short story "The Mass of St. Sécaire", though I played fast-and-loose with that canon and was very liberal in my expansion of the story; reading it is completely unnecessary and won't affect your understanding of this fic in the slightest. Also, the quote about the Mass isn't Bladé, but a translation/interpretation by James George Frazer in his work The Golden Bough.

In a side alley, in a neighborhood of dubious reputation in an otherwise vibrant tropical city, sat a house. It was large, unusually so, and might have been grand once, but its graceful gables and colorful woodwork were slowly being eaten away by the elements and the psychic energy of its inhabitants. Lately, the landlord had taken to renting out rooms, for ramshackle though it was, it was prized by a certain subset of the population who took to it for its bloody history, its rumored hauntings, and its excellent price. Johannes Cabal chose it for its herb garden and its proximity to the local cemetery.

In a low-ceilinged room with ominously dark and peeling wallpaper, Cabal finished pencilling a ciphered list in his small black notebook; it began with _C. rostrata_ and ended with _corpse matter_ , which was par for the course as far as his notes went. He tapped his pencil against his lip in thought, only to be interrupted by a loud thumping and a wordless moan from the armoire sharing the tiny room with him. He glared at it until it quieted, and added _D. stramonium - ineffective_. He then shut the notebook, chambered a round in his Webley .577 Boxer, and went to take care of the thing in the closet.

Ten minutes later, having neatly avoided any awkward questions from the landlord like "What was that noise?" or "What's this smelly green sludge oozing from the ceiling?" by pretending to know neither French (untrue) nor Haitian Creole (true), Cabal found himself walking the busy streets of Port-au-Prince. He was drenched in sweat fewer than five minutes later, but it didn't concern him. Making his way to the harbor, Cabal checked his suit pocket for the telegram he'd spent months waiting for, running his finger along its crisp creases. Booking immediate passage to the continent would be expensive (though within his means, if his mental calculations were correct, and they were), but it would be well worth it. Cabal had business in France. But first, a stop somewhat closer to home.

 ****

. . .

"No," Horst said, and shut the door.

Cabal jammed his foot between it and the doorjamb, and said through the space remaining, "I don't think you understand just how important this is."

"As important as the thing with the jiang-shi and the mortician's wife, maybe?" Horst said scathingly, but opened the door an additional inch or two. Cabal removed his foot from its position as doorstop and chose to ignore Horst's comment.

"I've found the bones of Saint Sécaire," he said. "Now all I have to do is dig them up."

"The bones of who, now?"

Cabal suppressed an urge to roll his eyes. "Saint Sécaire. He was a Catholic priest, circa 1380, and one of history's more effective necromancers." Cabal paused momentarily. "He was discovered mid-ritual by an altar boy, sacrificing a virgin lamb to Satan. I suspect that got him thoroughly excommunicated, perhaps to death. Never wrote anything down, though, which is why I need to talk to him."

"Or his ghost, at least," commented Horst. He leaned against the doorjamb and looked at his brother, so young, fresh out of university (to put it delicately), lit with the glow of scientific inquiry and fraternal irritation.

"I'll settle for his skull," Cabal replied, missing the faint smile Horst gave him. "We need to leave as soon as possible. I've booked us tickets on the next train out of - "

"Hold on," Horst said, raising his hand as if waiting to be called upon. Cabal stopped in in mid-sentence. "Why me? Me, specifically, I mean," he added, forestalling any prevaricating he might have invited.

Cabal glanced to the side, reminded himself that help was necessary for this job and that Horst always tried to get a rise out of him (so don't give in), and said, "You aren't the most inept person I've worked with."

" _Johannes_." Horst sounded delighted. Cabal closed his eyes and pretended not to listen. "Are you saying you need me? I think you are."

"Yes, Horst," Cabal recited in a monotone. "I need your help."

"Well." Horst hovered in the doorway for a moment, thinking, before he stepped back and flung the door wide, inviting Cabal in. "When do we leave?"

 ****

. . .

Horst had, in the past, spent most of his time with his brother being torn between hitting him and hugging him; his brain reached a compromise by winding Johannes up as often as possible, and taking care of him in a roundabout fashion he would never suspect. This trip was no different: Johannes spent most of it scribbling sinister diagrams in his notebook and scrutinizing pages written in a language that looked like French but really, really wasn't (Horst tried to read a bit, and ended up with a pounding headache and a profound sense of unease), while Horst amused himself flirting with the pretty sisters sharing their car and making sure Johannes ate.

The train was headed to France, or, more specifically, to the city of Auch in Gascony, where they would meet Johannes' contact, get his information, and go haring off to find this saint's skeleton in what Horst guessed would be either a museum or some poor sod's backyard. Horst hoped it would be the latter; the last two times he was press ganged into playing assistant for his brother had involved too many alarms and far too many guns in his face for his tastes. Sneaking onto someone's private property and digging up their yard, on the other hand, would be easy. Horst had every confidence in Johannes' ability to sneak.

As the train ground to a halt in Auch, Horst straightened his lapels and dusted off his trousers; out of the corner of his eye, he saw Johannes scrambling for his things - notebook, cane, blue-tinted spectacles - and stowing them in his Gladstone with near reverence. Inside the bag, too, was the glint of his revolver. Horst wished he'd had the foresight to bring one of his own.

"We're looking for a short man, dark hair, weathered skin," said Johannes as they descended into the station. "He's in his mid-forties, thinks too much of himself and always looks like he's swallowed a lemon - ah, there he is!" And Johannes dashed off, leaving Horst to ponder the irony of Johannes describing someone other than himself in quite that manner.

"Cabal," the man greeted them, staring at Johannes as if imagining stabbing him a thousand times about the torso.

"Arounet," Johannes responded, matching him cold glare for icy tone. "What do you have for me?"

"I'll have the money first, is what I'll have," said Arounet. Johannes gave him a cool little smile, edging on a sneer, and counted out a large quantity of francs into the man's hand.

"Now," he said, "let's hear what you have to say."

Horst laid a hand on Johannes' shoulder, and felt him stiffen briefly before relaxing.

"Maybe we should take this conversation somewhere a little more private," he murmured in Johannes' ear. _Somewhere where we won't be talking about necromancy in public_. "Just a thought."

Johannes exhaled through his nose, and glanced at Arounet, whose glare hadn't lessened in the least. He managed a conciliatory smile-grimace, and said, "My brother has the right idea. Shall we retire somewhere more secluded?"

Horst gave Arounet a genuinely charming smile, just in case that sweetened the deal. Arounet shrugged.

"Wherever," he said. "You're paying."

 ****

. . .

Cabal stalked through the streets of Auch, several paces ahead of his brother, mind whirring.

"The Mass of Saint Sécaire," he muttered viciously, earning himself a few startled looks from passersby. "A book full of riddles, nothing substantial. That _verdammt_ occultist should never have been published - "

"Johannes." Horst's tone was wheedling, which made Cabal bristle even more. "Johannes, maybe this Mass thing isn't a load of bollocks - "

"Oh, it's real, that's for sure," snapped Cabal. "It doesn't _do_ anything, but it's real."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yes."

Cabal didn't elaborate, but his silence said enough. He could feel Horst digesting this at his side, and thought of the passage by Bladé he'd read to him in the empty café, after Arounet had left them.

 _  
_

> _The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross, but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him; even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire._

 _  
_

Horst said quietly, "You didn't - "

"What, drown an infant? Host an orgy? No. There might be elements of true magic in that ritual - _might_ \- but it's been swallowed up by dramatics and special effects. It's a bunch of superstitious nonsense, as far as I'm concerned, used to reassure peasants that their enemies will perish and to give priests an excuse to misbehave." Cabal's lip curled. "It makes doing _that_ easy. Which says a lot about humanity."

After a pause, Horst said, "I'm glad you're so certain."

"I detect a note of sarcasm, there."

"Well," Horst said, and they stopped in front of the train station. Cabal spoke with the teller at the ticket booth in low voices, and was pointed in the direction they needed to go. He nodded and took off briskly. Horst matched his pace, and continued:

"Well, what about the man who died? Larufe or whatever his name was."

"Larue, and it was sleeping sickness. Caused by protozoa and transmitted by flies. It's not exactly sorcery."

"Unless the disease was just a tool of the magician."

"That's not how it works," Cabal said, but he wavered. He was a necromancer ( _necrothologist_ , Horst whispered in his head, _let's not inflate your ego too much, now_ ), but he knew a fair bit of black magic, enough to know it was unpredictable at best and completely chaotic at worst. There was a possibility…but no precedent. Unless this was going to become the precedent, of course. Cabal studied the thought for another moment, then filed it away to be examined at his leisure.

They reached their destination, and Cabal haggled with the woman renting the bicycles for about a minute before losing his patience and paying her what she wanted. He propped his Gladstone on the handlebars and glanced at Horst, who had situated his own bag quite nicely.

They rode in silence for a little while before Horst said, "So, where are we going?"

"Arques-le-Roi," Cabal said. "It's only an hour's ride away, but we'll probably be staying the night. I hope you packed a change of clothes."

"Arques-le-Roi," said Horst. "You mean the place where the Black Mass you absolutely don't believe in was held by definite charlatans with a flexible definition of morality and a taste for attempting to destroy the lives of people they claim to love?"

"I mean the place where the first verifiable mention of St. Sécaire has popped up in over a century, other than penny dreadfuls and lunatics mispronouncing Latin in Salem, yes," Cabal said shortly.

"All right," Horst said agreeably, and Cabal lost the will to be annoyed with him.

 ****

. . .

In the past few years, Cabal had worn calluses on his hands in the exact places a man would hold a shovel for digging at least six feet into the ground. Horst, being generally opposed to physical labor except when absolutely necessary, was not so lucky; every now and then, he stopped digging and shook his hands out, wincing at the pain of blisters cheerfully forming on his palms.

"Deal with it," said Cabal, who had no time for wimps. Exasperated by their lack of progress, he dug his hand into the dirt ( _loose soil_ , he thought, _odd_ ), and flung a clod of it out of the hole. That it hit Horst squarely in the thigh was pure happenstance.

"Look," Horst said, kneeling down beside the newly-dug grave. His complete lack of complaint about the dirt soiling his expensive trousers gave Cabal a very bad feeling. "We can try it again tomorrow. The riddles are hard to solve. There are sure to be other places."

"We've been here a _week_ ," Cabal hissed, rising from the grave like an angry, muddy apparition in a good suit. "The riddles are useless, just rumors. This will be our last night - "

He broke off mid-sentence, transfixed by the ground. _Loose soil_ , he thought. _Someone else has been digging here._

"Johannes?" Horst said, sounding worried, but Cabal ignored him. Something was very, very wrong here. The breeze had dropped off, the clouds had unveiled a waxing moon. The air was too still, disturbed only by his breathing and Horst's. Cabal whirled around, glancing in every direction.

"A demon with bat's wings and the head of an ass," he said aloud. "That's what the Mass is supposed to summon."

"I thought you didn't believe in that," said Horst, but he was clearly just as uneasy as Cabal.

"You'd better start," said a voice from the shadows. Both Cabal and Horst went for the Webley .577 in Cabal's bag, but the woman edged out into the moonlight, and they froze. Propped on her shoulder was a decidedly large rifle.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. She was thin, dark-haired, and wan, with the wild eyes of prey turned predator, and she carried a knapsack slung across her body, bulging conspicuously. Cabal eyed it briefly before his eyes were yanked back to the rifle by common sense and fear for his life.

"Nothing much," Horst lied, while Cabal was still staring at the knapsack. "My brother here lost something a while back, and we're just trying to find it. Can't remember where he dropped it for the life of us, of course."

"Oh?" said the girl. "What did you lose that has you out in the cemetery digging up graves, then?"

Horst opened his mouth, but Cabal said, "That skull you have in your bag, I think."

Her gun jerked toward him, and Cabal twitched.

"You - " she said faintly.

Cabal spoke over her stammering syllables, growing more and more certain of his hypothesis with each passing moment. He now knew what had put him so on edge before: the curling trails of sorcery were everywhere, and this girl positively crackled with it.

"You dug up the skeleton of St. Sécaire," he said. "But you only kept his skull. You're clearly not a necromancer, so why are you interested?"

Her gun wavered. " _You're_ a necromancer."

Cabal narrowed his eyes.

Horst said, softly, "And you're Félise Larue. Widow of Pierre."

She drew a shaky breath, and nodded.

"I've been waiting five years for this," she said. "I remarried, you know. I needed the money for my research. And the old priest, the apostate, _the one who killed my husband_ , he's gone, so there was no one to interfere. But I'm not good enough to summon Sécaire and make him undo what his Mass has done."

"Ah," said Cabal. "So it does work. Interesting."

"How interesting would it be if you lost the one you love to its evil?" she spat. Cabal said nothing, and she looked away, trying to regain a modicum of poise.

"You're a necromancer," she said again. This time, she accompanied it with the click of a cocked rifle. Cabal stood firm, and thought, _Out of all the ways I could die doing what I do, this is it?_

"I need your help," Félise said, and pointed the barrel of the rifle to the old church on the east border of the cemetery. "This way."

 ****

. . .

The stone floor directly in front of the altar was covered with chalk scribbles. Cabal stood there and examined them.

"You _want_ to help me?" Félise sounded doubtful. "Truly?"

"You want to talk to Sécaire, I want to talk to Sécaire, it only makes sense," Cabal said, and dropped to his knees. He crawled around the pentagram she'd drawn, almost twice his height in diameter, and read the inscriptions looping around the rim. He recognized the ritual, but it was shoddily done.

"You didn't research this much at all, did you?" he asked, not caring overmuch about the answer. He got up and continued, "We're going to need charcoal, a dead cat - or the ash from a burnt one, I don't care - lemon juice, and a _secespita_."

"A what?"

"A knife." Cabal waved his hand dismissively. "Any knife, as long as it's been used for bloodletting."

"I can find all that in the village," said Félise. "Is there anything else?"

"The skull," Cabal said. He hummed thoughtfully, and added, "You might need to cut off a finger."

"Now?"

Horst made an odd noise, but Cabal disregarded it. "No, but later."

"All right," she said, and shut her eyes. "Charcoal, cat, lemon, knife. I'll be right back."

"Be quick," Horst said to her as Cabal circled the pentagram, frowning.

"We'll need to do this outside," he said, and made for the door, Horst following. "Can't have this interfering with our ritual - why are you looking at me like that?"

"Johannes," Horst said, "is this really necessary?"

"Is anything really necessary?" asked Cabal, and smiled. He was close enough to success to taste it, though he was suspicious of the ease with which he'd met Félise and found the skull. Still, he cautiously allowed himself to hope.

"She's going to lose her finger." Horst was more serious that Cabal could quite remember him being. "She could lose her life."

"She won't lose her finger," Cabal said. "That was just to see if she'd do it - which she would. The ritual calls for blood, not body parts."

"I notice you said nothing about her life."

"It's a risk we all take." Cabal hoisted himself onto one of the flatter boulders clustered around the church, and patted it. "This will do, I think."

"I hope not," Horst said darkly.

"You can always back out," said Cabal, slipping back to the ground and going to his Gladstone. Behind him, Horst looked down at the ground, expression torn, then glanced up at his brother.

"I'm curious," he said, casually. "Enough to be an idiot, at least. I'll do it."

"Fine," said Cabal, and then Félise Larue came sprinting up the hill, carrying their supplies in her bag.

Cabal shrugged out of his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, took the charcoal, and observed the boulder with calculating eyes before sketching out the skeleton of a pentagram on the flat top. Horst leaned against another rock, along with Félise, and watched him.

Five points and the circle to link them. Not taking his eyes off his work, he instructed Horst to cut the cat's tail into five segments, slicing between every fourth vertebra. Now the strokes to join the points in the familiar shape of a star, keeping careful note of the order (two down from the top point, one across from east to west, two from each horizontal point to their opposite, west to east first).

"Félise, squeeze the lemon juice, one beakerful should do it - it's in my bag, get it for her, will you, Horst?"

And now the spell itself, the strange not-French Horst had seen earlier: linguistic remnants of a people once native to this region, incinerated by their imperfect grasp of their own magic. Cabal was better than they were.

"Done," he announced, and stepped back, eyeing his work critically. "Cat tail."

He held his hand out, and Horst dropped the pieces into his palm.

"I get the cat," he said as Cabal placed a segment at each point of the pentagram. "But what's with the lemon?"

"Pain," said Cabal, adjusting the cat tail on the southeast point minutely. He looked at Horst, who didn't seem pleased by that explanation. "We don't know how he died, but we can assume it wasn't pleasant."

The moon shone brightly overhead, and Cabal tilted his head to look at it. "We have to show sympathy."

He cleared his throat, and added, "Symbolically, of course."

"Of course," echoed Horst.

Cabal took a step back, as if physically detaching himself from the sky, and looked at Félise.

"Skull, if you would," he said. She handed it to him mutely, and he set it in the very center of the pentagram. He picked up the knife and lemon juice and set them on the rock, then jumped up, settling in lotus position. Horst and Félise joined him, the former lagging a bit behind.

The pentagram was much smaller than the one in the church; one could easily lean forward and put their hand on the skull from their positions on the outer ring. Cabal's handwriting along the edges of the circle was minute and utterly clear.

"All ready?" he asked, and received affirmatives. "All right, then."

Cabal exhaled, then shut his eyes. He took a moment to center himself, then opened his mouth and began to speak.

The words buzzed as they left his lips, set loose like locusts, and spread a tingling sensation through his lips and cheeks. His vocal cords strained and stretched, protesting each syllable as he choked them out; they gained a pace all their own, falling out of his mouth faster and faster. Abruptly, his spine straightened and his eyes snapped open, his body seething with the spell; Horst, across from him, was staring in shock, while Félise had her eyes closed. Cabal registered all this distantly, and reached for the knife.

He sliced open his palm, a deep red score running from the mount of Jupiter across the life line, and handed the knife to Félise, who did the same. As Horst cut his hand, hissing at the pain, Cabal took the beaker of lemon juice and poured a third of it over his welling wound. The magic seized his pain with sadistic pleasure and magnified it exponentially, feeding it through his nervous system. He opened his mouth to cry out, but all that he shouted was the incantation.

And now it drew to a close; blood was hissing as it dropped on the stone inside the pentagram, and the cat tails were smoking, the skull drenched in shadow. Cabal spoke the final syllable, and the pentagram exploded.

A creature shot out from the skull, heralded by a blaze of heat, and expanded, spreading webbed wings that inhabited too many dimensions to look at properly. Cabal shut his eyes, and mouthed as if in prayer, _Saint Sécaire_.

The saint took no notice of Cabal or Horst, and plucked Félise by the throat, lifting her to his mouth. He whispered in her ear like a lover, and the men on the ground heard her scream, then burst into laughter. It was infectious; hysteria bubbled up in Cabal's and Horst's throats, and the saint chuckled too before tossing Félise to the grass below. As soon as he dropped her, the laughter stopped, and Cabal rolled into a half-crouch, poised as if to spring - but the saint folded his wings and plummeted back to his skull, back to Hell, and took all the air with him.

Gasping and choking, the three flailed in the dirt, but Cabal, dragging himself to Félise's side, grabbed her by the wrist and rasped, "How did he do it? _What did he say?_ "

She seized him by his collar and dragged him close; he watched her lips as she spoke without sound.

 _"How does a saint get to Hell?"_

The question was its own answer. Johannes Cabal had his missing variable.

 ****

. . .

Horst watched Johannes anxiously as he pressed a handkerchief to his lips and coughed; it was flecked with blood when he withdrew it, a droplet clinging to the corner of his mouth.

"Do you need anything? Tea? A lozenge?" he asked, well aware Johannes would deem him a busybody and not minding in the least bit.

"No," Johannes said firmly. "No, I do not. It'll stop eventually."

He coughed again, and looked distastefully at the handkerchief. "I'll need to be more careful next time I try that particular ritual."

"Had you ever done anything that big before?" Horst asked.

"No," Johannes admitted, after a moment of hesitation. "But it came out exactly as I expected."

 _Oh, really?_ Horst thought, but chose not to say it. Instead, he turned his head to stare out the window of the train, watching the countryside whipping past. "Do you think she'll do it?"

"What, sell her soul?" Johannes' voice was quiet. "Yes. She loved him."

"And you think that's worth it?" Horst pressed.

Johannes shook his head, not a gesture of negation but of irritation, shaking off his moment of reflection.

"I think it's impractical to do it without investigating all other avenues of resurrection first," he said with a sniff. He arranged his handkerchief in his lap, running his finger over the well-ironed folds, and added, "Take, for example, the Agrippa books, _De occulta philosophia_."

"I bet we will," muttered Horst.

"Four feet tall and made of human skin," Johannes mused, reminding Horst disconcertingly of a woman sighing over a diamond. "Allegedly so evil they have to be chained up in an empty room. Full of ancient secrets. Written by a necromancer, of course."

"I'm sure you have no interest in it whatsoever, and will behave like any sensible person and admire it from a distance. Say, the distance between reading about it and looking for it."

"We're going to Rome," Johannes said, ignoring him completely.

"I suppose we are," Horst said with a sigh, and slumped against the window. Rome. Cursed books. More breaking and entering. Italian food and Italian women. Well, maybe this wouldn't be too bad.

It didn't occur to Horst to stay behind. Someone had to keep watch over the little bastard, after all.


End file.
